Raise a glass

The Slow Food Movement was started in Italy in the late 1980s as a cultural antidote to the rise of fast food, but also to highlight and celebrate local and traditional growing and making. When Danny Childs created the name Slow Drinks for his media presence, it was not prompted by brashness but by the passionate application of many of the tenets of the food movement toward creating delicious things to drink.
Childs emphasizes taking foraged and farmed botanical ingredients from the region and using traditional methods of making wines, beers, ciders, spirits, meads, sodas, shrubs, syrups and tinctures. He also emphasizes seasonal craft-level production based on what nature provides. “I want to run out of ingredients and use up whatever the land provided me in any given season.”
One only needs to visit The Farm and Fisherman Tavern in Cherry Hill to get a better understanding of the cornucopia of what New Jersey provides Childs in this regard, packing an already well-chosen drinks menu with his creations and flourishes. He holds the title of bar manager there, but his business card may as well say “Grand Wizard.”
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With about half the ingredients farmed and the other half foraged, his concoctions can show up prismatically in the likes of celery soda, beet and rye kvass, blueberry vermouth, spruce beer and black walnut liqueur. But it’s the sampler of four housemade amari that may be the best expressions of the segue of the seasons since Vivaldi. While Vivaldi composed with musical notes and textures, Childs composes with ingredients and flavors.
As Childs puts it, the restaurant gave him the platform to display a passion that started with an interest in high school and then WWOOFing on farms in South America with his now wife Katie after they met at the University of Delaware, where he studied anthropology and ethnobotany. (WWOOFing is working volunteer gigs on farms through the Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms global organization.) It was in trying his hand at making ginger beer that launched him on this slow drinks journey.
The concepts and the influences, though, are not recent — both sides of his family made things like dandelion wine and root beer. Often though, with beverage trends, what is old is new again. Childs himself did not know of the family traditions until he started his own brewing.
Since before his nine years at the Farm and Fisherman, Childs has been endlessly searching and sourcing for ingredients and researching and experimenting with recipes and complementary combinations. He also has been collecting sources of information and inspiration from people like Nate Kleinman of the Experiment...